Debian Release Mgr. Proposes Dropping Some Archs 377
smerdyakov writes "In this story posted by Andrew Orlowski of the Register Debian Release manager Steve Langasek has announced that support will be dropped for all but four computer architectures. Among the reasons cited for doing this are improving testing coordination, 'a more limber release process' and ultimately a ('hopefully') shorter release cyle. The main architectures to survive will be Intel x86, AMD64, PowerPC and IA-64." Actually, the story says clearly that this is only a proposal at this point, but it's definitely something to watch.
Those would be the good ones to keep... (Score:5, Interesting)
About time (Score:4, Interesting)
Older Hardware (Score:4, Interesting)
So the question becomes, who will bother supporting non-mainstream hardware? They are still functional machines for me...
Debian.. PFHT.. (Score:3, Interesting)
As for their decision to drop SPARC, good.. I ran Debian on my SPARC boxes for a few years, and it was garbage. Slow, clumsy and at times a few bad packages got in causing problems. Debian for SPARC made Solaris look like a rocket ship.
For all you SPARC users, switch to Gentoo (Running it and loving it) or support one of the other SPARC distros like Splack (Slackware-based SPARC distro).
Don't we already have that? (Score:4, Interesting)
drop me too! (Score:3, Interesting)
because of the feature freeze. Making PowerPC be
unofficial would allow this to get fixed.
Heck, drop every port but x86. It's not nice how
the x86 port drags around the others by the
release cycle.
What about ARM ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps Debian isn't trying to address the embedded segment.
Like Gentoo? (Score:1, Interesting)
'a more limber release process' and ultimately a ('hopefully') shorter release cyle.
You mean like Gentoo? And they still support Sparc.
Re:Those would be the good ones to keep... (Score:4, Interesting)
SPARC has barely any upstream support in the kernel. kernel.org kernels are frequently broken. What's worse, Debian hasn't got a SPARC maintainer right now.
Re:IA-64 vs AMD64 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Hooray "limber release process!" (Score:3, Interesting)
Last release was 19 July, 2002. While one can apt-get his way to modern times, I have to believe an annual release (or more frequent) will only help bring in fresh users.
FWIW, I run Gentoo with a 2.6 kernel. I have issues from time to time, but they get ironed out with a little patience. There's always someone in the community that has an answer and very often, a solution.
It seems Linux and its distributions are at a minor crossroads where stable releases and unstable, bleeding edge releases meet. On one hand you want to get new features out to users so they can test them and the software can be refined, but now that Linux is finding its way into production environments and a few desktops, bugs can be real backbreakers.
Re:Those would be the good ones to keep... (Score:5, Interesting)
The lack of a SPARC maintainer is a concern, but one that can easily be addressed. (politics aside.)
Re:drop me too! (Score:4, Interesting)
status means that the port is free to ignore the
normal release cycle. The normal release cycle is,
predictably, controlled by the x86 majority.
Once free of such tyranny, the non-x86 ports can
fix things without concern for x86 releases.
I'm a Debian user with PowerPC, and I'd love to
have a modern glibc. The upcoming release isn't
worth much on PowerPC right now, because it's still
using the old pre-NPTL LinuxThreads hack.
Re:What about ARM ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Consider that a minimum Debian installation is over 100MB. Debian is definitly not aimed at embedded systems. Never was.
-matthew
Re:This is not final (Score:3, Interesting)
As a long time Debian user, I'm all for it, but that's probably because I'm only interested in x86 and AMD64. I think having multiple arch's is a great idea in principle, and I'm not overly keen on the idea of stomping on the minority, but it's been pretty obvious for a long while that Debian is struggling get all this stuff together into a stable release. No other distribution seems to have anywhere near the long release cycle that Debian has. Interestingly none of the others have anywhere near the number of arch's to support either. The correlation seems fairly obvious to me.
Re:Dropping ARM??? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the nslu2 hackers start with deb.
Definitely a great idea (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Those would be the good ones to keep... (Score:2, Interesting)
It's because of HP. HP and Intel together are both flogging the dead horse that is IA64 and trying to get people to switch to their lame platform. I would imagine that HP contributes enough development time to keep the IA64 port of Debian viable.
What's really funny is that HP and Intel can't even give IA64 servers away. [theregister.co.uk]
Embed Me (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I disagree wholeheartedly. (Score:1, Interesting)
Debian, like anything in the Matrix is a choose, stability and testing or this century software.
Debian Sparc (Score:2, Interesting)
I suppose that if the Debian devels are pig headed enough to have a meeting like this without inviting anyone from the sparc community, it really says something about what users they care about.
I've been saying for years that Debian/GNU is _the_ Server OS. A look at the proposed Arch support would leave one to believe that they want to re-vector themselves as _the_ desktop os.
The slow and steady release schedule that debian has stuck to is great for server and other enterprise uses but does leave a bit to be desired for the desktop, look at the void being filled by ubuntu, progeny and mepis on the desktop.
I suppose I knew this day was coming, #gentoo-sparc currently is a better source of tech support than #debian-sparc is on freenode....
I really didnt want to switch to gentoo, but unless I want to go the BSD route that seems to be the only viable option.
Can someone send me a 4x5" gentoo sticker that I can use to cover the red swirl sticker on my truck?
well... (Score:4, Interesting)
However, it is sometimes very useful to use a full system like this to do native compiles of your applications (instead of cross-compiling) and native debugging. Of course, when you move to your custom hardware, you usually have to drop all that nice stuff.
(By the way, I am really a big fan of the Cirrus Logic 93xx series system-on-chip processors. After working on two other ARM SoC systems and one MIPS system, the Cirrus 9315 was by far the best supported.)
Re:Embed Me (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:IA-64 vs AMD64 (Score:4, Interesting)
The real paradigm shift of commercially released risc processors wasn't a simplified instruction set (they may have once been simple, but that's definately no longer true). The real difference is a consistent addressing schema and a load/store architecture. EPIC, the instruction set architecture of the itanium, does this also.
In fact, if you read each instruction sequentially out of ia64 bundles, each could be an instruction on a hypothetical risc processor. This defeats some of the purpose of the ISA, but is technically valid. I have to agree with the previous poster who suggested that the itanium is risc-like. It is. It's a rather-wide risc processor whose pipe-line control logic is part of the compiler, rather than embeded in hardware. Everything else in the itanium could be added to a risc processor except for the back-wards compatibility thing. (rolling register window, predicated execution, speculative loads, etc)
Re:Those would be the good ones to keep... (Score:5, Interesting)
Why use linux on sparc 32 in 3 letters : SMP.
Fine hardware, dead cheap, and NO bsd was up to it (until recently, if it happens to work now).
Debian back out in that area is a stab in the back for any user.
Re:Debian.. PFHT.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Come on, man, what myths you spew about Debian in general! You may wish to revise your statement and relegate it to SPARC specificaly...
I'm writing this on a Kanotix install of Debian-unstable - there is nothing "old" about it, or slow for that matter. Replace "politics" with "principles". It's not as if it's a handicap! Debian separates that software which fits into with their principles from that which doesn't, but, honestly, as a user of a modern Debian-based distro, in practical terms as to what I want to install and use, I hardly notice. Further, at least Debian has some principles as far as companies go...
What Debian means to me is simply the absolute best package system in the sense that they take extreme care and I won't break something when I upgrade. I'm using the same brand-spanking new version of Firefox as you, you Gentoo-zealot, and I got it via apt.
Most distros presume to do what Gentoo and Debian can do these days, but, have you ever used Mandrake's URPMI for example!? I honestly can't say how good or bad the Gentoo package system is, but I can say this, in terms of avoiding dependency-hell, Debian is the best I've used, by leaps and bounds. Yes, I'm sure that compiling everything results in tighter and faster code, but there are many ways to judge the value of something and on my old hardware, Debian feels quite nice, even in full KDE/OpenOffice heavy-GUI glory.
Re:Support Itanium, drop SPARC? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Debian Sparc (Score:3, Interesting)
According to this proposal, Sarge would still support Sparc, but the next release wouldn't. I'd bet dollars to donuts that you'd get at least two years of use out of Sarge before wanting or needing to upgrade.
Seeing as I have currenlty used Debian on Sparc for about 6 years now or more I can easily see it remaining in use for another two years at least.
Also with the mad discard of "not Windows" boxes by Suits I find more and more useful Sparc hardware cheaply available. Several of my friends now have E3000 boxes that they paid little or nothing for. A good portion of those run Debian. I myself am working on getting an E450 from my workplace as soon as it is retired.
So, please tell Debian why Sparc will still be important to you in two years.
I think I'll do just that.
Re:How did you get around the lack of a MMU? (Score:3, Interesting)
I didn't get around, I just installed an mtec 500/030 board, they're not fast (3 bogomips
Tiny, Desktop and Server platforms (Score:2, Interesting)
After all, it makes as little sense to have KDevelop running on m68k as having a Gaim package for s390.
I would be a victim... (Score:2, Interesting)
That proposal aims for stable releases. I see no problem seeing an unstable m68k debian popping up after some time. Right now even the stable m68k-Debian is a rotting piece of shit not working at all so why bother with stable at all?
Re:I disagree wholeheartedly. (Score:2, Interesting)
If I wanted to do that, why wouldn't I just use Ubuntu?
(And if it's easier for people who've been using Debian for close to 10 years, like me, to switch to Ubuntu when installing, you've got a problem.)